Sarah Rogers

An Introduction to Global Visual Culture
This course is an introduction to the visual cultures of the world, with an emphasis on how images, objects, and monuments are made, experienced, exchanged, and used by groups of people with diverse religious, socio-economic, and cultural backgrounds. We will focus on themes that have been taken up by different cultures and adapted over time, such as monumentality, the sacred, embodiment, science, and technology. Through a close study of these themes, we will consider how materials, cultures, and histories are transformed and negotiated through making and viewing works of art. In the process, we will challenge the art historical canon by shedding light on marginalized periods, regions, and artworks. 2 hrs. lect./1 hr. disc.

Art and Protest
Can art serve as a means for resistance and political change? Can art only call attention to social inequalities or can it initiate systemic change? What is the difference between propaganda and activism? In this course, we will examine these questions through close analysis of works dating from the French Revolution to the contemporary moment. We will consider a range of strategies across diverse geographies. We will also examine curatorial strategies to critique the cultural assumptions of museums and recent efforts to boycott museums’ financial ties and political complicities. This course is held in conjunction with the Middlebury College Museum of Art and students will have the opportunity to work closely with the current exhibition. 3 hrs. lect.

Photography in the Middle East
In this course we will survey 19th and 20th century photographs of the Middle East. We will consider indigenous studios as well as European and U.S. photographers and artists who traveled to the region and circulated their photographs as visual knowledge of distant cultures, peoples, monuments, landscapes, and experiences. Looking at a range of genres, we will examine how photographs visually construct notions of race, gender, class, religion, and cultural otherness. Students will work with original photographs in the collection at the Middlebury College Museum of Art. 3 hrs. lect.

Art Response to Political Strife: Contemporary Arab Art
In what ways can artists protest war? What are the possibilities for creating art during times of conflict? How do artists respond to the memories of a violent and divisive recent past? These are some of the questions we will examine in this course, with a focus on contemporary artistic practices in the Arab world. Considering a range of media—documentary and experimental film, installation and conceptual practices, painting, photography, and monuments, we will ask how artists living in Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Algiers are able to confront the traumas of the past, intervene in contemporary socio-political realities, and imagine a different future. (not open to students who have taken INTD 1209)

Orientalism and the Visual Arts
In this course we will consider the relationship between visual culture and the politics of knowledge. Comparatively examining a series of cross-cultural encounters in modern and contemporary art, we will ask how knowledge is visually codified, labeled, and displayed. The course will begin with a reading of Edward Said’s Orientalism. We will then examine a series of case studies in order to identify and compare strategies of both “representing the other” and “speaking back.” We will address notions of exoticism, cultural difference, authenticity, and native authority with a particular focus on the ways in which the visual arts construct notions of race and gender and difference in representations of the Middle East, and more specifically, the Arab world. Case studies, drawn from the late eighteenth century until today, will be focused in the discipline of art history and the geographical regions of primarily the Middle East and Africa, as well as Europe and the U.S. 3 hrs sem.

WWI and Its Legacies in Art and Photography
“We will glorify war,” declared the Italian poet Marinetti in the 1909 Futurist Manifesto. For Marinetti and his fellow writers and artists, military conflict held the promise of restoring a decadent Europe. Meanwhile, the new technology of photography was being deployed across the Ottoman Empire by European governments to document a declining empire with vast territory up for grabs. The outbreak of World War I, however, soon exposed the grim realities and failed promises of modernity and technologies of warfare. In this course we will consider how art and photography in Europe, America, and across the Ottoman Empire documented, portrayed, and confronted World War I, and the colonial and aesthetic legacies of the first industrialized global war in today’s world.

Photography and the Ethics of Witnessing
In this course we will consider photography as an eyewitness to violence and human suffering and the ethical position of the viewer. What does it mean to regard the pain of others? Can there be beauty in violence? Can a photograph alone speak truth? Can photographs initiate empathy or spark activism? Are we so bombarded with images of violence that we are immune to their power? To explore these questions, we will examine a series of case studies, from photography’s earliest documentation on the battlefield to contemporary examples of drone imagery used to wage war from a distance. We will also consider contemporary artists who integrate documentary photography into their practice as a form of resistance.